Success, or let’s call it better achievements. It can change your life and it is much scarier than it seems. I will not go into the reasons for the fear of success, but I will show you how it manifests itself in investing and trading.
Lack of confidence in yourself and your method
When you open a trade with the goal of making 10% profit, and immediately close it when the price moves 1% in your direction, and so on over and over again.
There are many reasons for this phenomenon, both greed and fear of loss. But there is also a non-trivial explanation: you subconsciously create conditions in which you cannot win. If you constantly enter trades with a stop of 2% and take profit of 5%, but close the trade when the price has barely risen by 0.5%. You will most likely get a negative mathematical expectation.
Here you are pretending to be a scalper, but in reality you are afraid to make a really good profit and get some changes in your life through the realization of your possibly quite working strategy.
Often at this point in time we are afraid that if we follow the strategy and consistently get losses, we will realize that the strategy does not work (unprofitable) and we need to create another one or significantly improve the existing one and the result is not guaranteed. It is easier to just live with the fantasy that you have a good strategy and you are perfectly able to analyze the market, but you are just trading undisciplined.
But if you had traded according to the strategy, you would have been rich by now. Quite a paradoxical, yet comfortable state of affairs.
All this sabotaging of your own plan is your psychological defense against change.
The Samurai Game
The exact opposite manifestation of fear of success. This is when we set unrealistic goals. For example, we buy one token and wait for it to double 50 times.
Or we create a portfolio of 20 tokens and wait for all of them to make a profit. And we gradually sell the tokens that have grown, and those that do not grow or even fall, we buy them again and again. Instead of recognizing that you cannot buy 20 tokens and make a profit on all of them. And you should just look at the portfolio as a whole and get rid of the junk that is going down.
Another manifestation is when you basically have a tolerable strategy and you can trade profitably for some time, getting, say, 6% a month. But you say to yourself, why 20% per quarter, you need 10% per day.
I do not want to be just a profitable trader, I want to be a samurai who can accelerate deposits to the sky in a few days. And then you are already loaded on all shoulders and try to make ten percent every day, you may get 7 days in a row and even 10 days, but then you just lose everything you have earned and more.
Or I will trade 14 hours a day and I will get rich soon. And after a month you are just exhausted and hate all this trading and no wonder you cannot trade in the plus.
When you set unrealistic goals, you’re not so stupid that you don’t realize it. But it’s a way of not moving from where you are and staying where you are.
All of this is often a realization of the fear of change, of success, of achievement.
Conslusions
There are many factors that influence you, and this is one way to interpret it.
Try to observe yourself how often we do some irrational things instead of just going for the goal.
Opening 50 trades a day, holding a token for years hoping for 50x and taking a barely noticeable profit is always easier than just following a plan.